Postal workers help the hungry Pantry grateful for assistance

BAR HARBOR – Along with junk mail, Mother’s Day cards and magazines, postman Gus Young is delivering something special in his saddlebag.

Instead of letters, he’s laden down with two plastic shopping bags full of rice and clanking cans of sweet potatoes. The food came from a tidy Victorian house, painted as brightly as a dime store lipstick display, where the bags were hanging on the mailbox. They’ll end up as a meal for a needy person receiving assistance from the Bar Harbor Food Pantry.

And even though this weekend’s food drive, part of the national “Stamp Out Hunger” campaign sponsored by the National Association of Letter Carriers and the U.S. Postal Service, means that the mailman from Tremont will end up lugging hundreds of extra pounds around his in-town route, he’s not complaining.

“I think it’s for a good cause,” he said Saturday morning. “I’ve got to carry heavy stuff all day. What’s the difference between carrying it out and carrying it back?”

On the way back to his postal truck, Young pauses to say a quick “good morning” to the folks staffing yard sale tables on what was the first dry morning all week. Back at the truck, the donated food goes in the front – except for a flat of pinto beans, 42 pounds in all, that is squeezed in with the brown delivery boxes in the back. The beans came from a restaurant and might make an awful lot of chili for a hungry family.

Those beans – and all the rest of the 1,585 pounds of food from the Bar Harbor drive – come at a time when the pantry’s cupboards were getting bare.

“I’m psyched about it,” Kate Maginn, director of the Bar Harbor Food Pantry, said. “I’m really happy, because in the summertime, we open our doors to the international workers for a one-time stop-in, to help them out. … It’s depleting the stores.”

Maginn was surrounded by hundreds of shopping bags stuffed with a variety of nonperishable food products. She’ll be busy sorting, checking for expiration dates and organizing the cans and boxes into the neat wooden shelves that line the walls of the YWCA for Tuesday morning’s open pantry hours.

The population served by the food bank includes elderly people, single moms, large families with two working parents and the international workers. Last month the service helped almost 200 adults and about 70 children, and donations of food are very welcome.

“We’re usually lacking protein sources,” Maginn said. “And lately canned fruit is really impossible to come across.”

The family-size cans of beef stew and boxes of protein-rich cereal delivered by the letter carriers will come as a blessing, according to the director.

“If you’ve resigned yourself to needing some help, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t eat well,” she said.

The Bar Harbor post office acquitted itself well this year, according to postmaster Josh Lynde. Some postal workers volunteered to come out on their day off to help mail carriers who walk their routes and to facilitate the drive, he said. Every person who donates food items gets a thank you note and the opportunity to win prizes from the local food drive sponsors.

“It’s been really successful in the past,” he said. Food from all of Maine’s participating post offices is weighed to get the state’s total number of donated pounds. Though the much larger communities of Bangor and Portland generally exceed Bar Harbor’s pounds, it’s all for the same good cause, he said. Maginn agreed.

“It was nice driving around this morning and seeing all the bags of food hanging on people’s mailboxes,” she said. “People donate nice things. They donate quality food, for the most part, and it’s nice.”